Technology, Games, Gadgets, and Geekery

Recently I’ve been pondering the whole pagerank system that Google has in place. Now I know there was a big fallout when Google re-evaluated the pagerank of many sites but that isn’t what I’m talking about here. What I am wondering is how do normal webpages, such as a real estate site, or check cashing website work their way up Google’s search ranks.

When a blog makes its way up the rankings, it is usually due to a lot of content updating and multiple pages posted per week, but a static websites that don’t update daily or even at all face a problem when it comes to this issue. SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) tell us that we are supposed to continually update our content and post new pages often to move up in the ranks, yet a site for a real estate company is not going to need to post new pages daily. The site would have nothing to link to except for its own internal pages, and no outside site would really link back to it. So how does this site actually make it up the SERPs (search engine results page)?

My philosophy would be that the site would have to employ some sort of blog that is of relevance to the business and attempt to update it often with information that users of the site would find helpful. Simply adding a blog and filling it with garbage wouldn’t help the site at all. But is that what all sites are supposed to do nowadays? Why should a static site be hurt by a blog in the same category that only scratches the surface of the topic. A blog written by a real estate agent or investor shouldn’t outrank a static website offering real estate sales in the area.

It shouldn’t be this hard to rank for something that your site is about. Using a real estate site base in let’s say Carlsbad, CA as an example, someone should be able to search for vacation rentals in Carlsbad, CA and have that site listed as one of the top sites, not a blog written by someone in Carlsbad who talks about vacation rentals.

Google’s pagerank system is what set them apart but I think it’s time that it goes through a small change that ranks blogs and website separately, keeping things fair for both types of sites.

Nobody knows for sure what exactly goes on under the hood of the Google PageRank system, but I’m not sure that sites that constantly add new pages are ranked higher – I believe that that is a myth. From my understanding, it’s all about links. If a page is linked to from many different places, it’ll have a good page rank. It will be even better if those external links are from sites of a high quality, that is sites that have a high Page Rank themselves. There are probably a ton of other factors involved as well, but links are the most heavily weighted.

Perhaps the idea of “adding/update” frequently is encouraged as a way to increase the odds of getting linked to. The more plentiful and diversified your content is, the more likely you are to engage the average reader. Say you have a person that wants to read about Sports and Video Games. You have a website that has a page about Cooking and a page about Politics. Our little guinea pig isn’t interested. But then you add a page about Sports. Now he’s reading. And, since he is a webmaster himself, he is going to add a link to your site on his page. So adding content would indirectly affect PageRank. But a static site wouldn’t be hurt, if it is seen as a quality site by the masses it will be linked to.

In a way adding a bunch of content is an application of the spaghetti principle – throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks. But it’s not going to make PageRank any higher if people aren’t linking.

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